4 mysteries with great locations, finely detailed plots

From 18th-century Sweden to contemporary Japan, these thrillers take readers around the globe.

2. 'The Doctor of Thessaly,' by Anne Zouroudi

Hermes Diaktoros, aka “the fat man,” combines the fastidious grooming of Hercules Poirot with the harmless questioning style of Columbo.

He's also an actual deus ex machina, the god Hermes, whose determination to see justice done doesn't always involve an arrest or trial.

“I work on behalf of the authorities, not the police,” he tells a woman in his third outing, “The Doctor of Thessaly.”

A middle-aged woman is left standing at the altar and her fiance is later found, blinded by acid, at a local chapel. Her sister, Noula, wasn't exactly happy that Chrissa Kaligi was getting married, thereby claiming the apartment that was supposed to be the elder daughter's dowry and leaving her the lone spinster. 

This is heady stuff for the small-minded, excuse me, small-town gossips, and Diaktoros's main problem is surviving the indifferent cooking at the kafenion where he is staying. Zouroudi's well-written series will charm anyone who's ever visited a Greek island, but she goes darker than many “cozies.” “The Doctor of Thessaly,” for example, looks at the ways women are ignored, abused, and discarded in rural Greece. While Diaktoros may prefer Greek coffee to bush tea, Alexander McCall Smith fans should definitely consider a trip to the Mediterranean.

2 of 4

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.